The worst performance of James McAvoy’s career: “Very poorly received”
There should probably be some kind of new category created for the big movie awards ceremonies, something along the lines of ‘Best actor nobody ever seems to mention but has been amazing in loads of stuff for seemingly ages’, or something like that. That way, James McAvoy might actually get some of the plaudits he deserves.
Much as everyone seems to know that he’s a decent guy and can name quite a lot of films he’s been great in, I would urge anyone to take a moment to consider just how good he’s been. And if you don’t have time to go back and see him in superb films like The Last King of Scotland (20 years ago!) or the bullet-bending thriller Wanted, or Joe Wright’s period drama Atonement, then simply find Split somewhere and prepare to be blown away.
Because McAvoy is absolutely unbelievable in the M Night Shyamalan successor to his 2000 comic book movie Unbreakable, with the Glaswegian actor having to convincingly work his way through 23 different personalities (plus a fairly terrifying 24th toward the end) as a twisted kidnapper of three teenage girls, who have to work out which personality will take pity on them and free them.
Split was deservedly a massive hit on release, bringing in $278million on a budget of just $9m, and it underlined what a generational talent McAvoy is, although while he picked up a couple of industry awards for his performance, he really should have been recognised by the big two. And irritatingly, that has been a theme across McAvoy’s 30-year career – it’s really a crime that he has never earned an Academy Award shout and only one Golden Globe nomination.
His presence is a stamp of quality on pretty much anything he appears in, aside from doing mega-budget movies like the X-Men franchise, McAvoy has a long list of performances that are well worth seeking out, you could have a McAvoy marathon if you wanted, with 2024’s Speak No Evil, the breakneck depravity of 2013’s Filth, Danny Boyle’s Trance the same year, 2017’s Atomic Blonde opposite Charlize Theron, and many more besides.
That’s without even mentioning all the extensive work he’s done on stage, where he’s appeared on and off in tandem with his film roles for more than two decades, winning awards for plays like The Ruling Class and Cyrano de Bergerac. But one early theatre performance, in a play named The Reel of the Hanged Man, badly knocked his confidence, as he told The Guardian, saying that the play was, “very poorly received, early in my career, and that was tough. Only one reviewer liked my performance in it, and they got my name wrong.”
It wasn’t enough to put him off treading the boards however, and he said he would still rather be in a good play than a good film, but added: “Between a bad film and a bad play, I’d 100% rather be in a bad film: you get paid more, the audience aren’t there, nobody can boo you, and by the time it comes out, it’s a year down the line and you don’t even have to see it.”
McAvoy is now moving behind the camera with his directorial debut, California Schemin’, the true-life tale of a pair of Scottish wannabe rappers who managed to convince American bigwigs they were an established hip-hop duo, landing a record deal and TV appearances. McAvoy also appears in the movie, which is due to hit cinemas in the UK in April.
